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Planning Mechanisms to Support the Supply of Affordable Housing Development

There are a number of tools available to governments to support housing affordability. These tools include managing land releases, income support programs, grants, special projects, housing subsidies and targeted loans.

With respect to the built form, affordable housing development refers to much more than the cost of rent or the purchase price of a dwelling. Other design issues need to be considered which impact on housing affordability in the longer term, such as proximity to services and transport, energy efficiency, the range of housing types on offer and ways to target affordability to different groups (e.g. first home buyers, workforce housing and migrants). Providing affordable housing only has short-terms impacts unless these associated issues are also addressed.

To realise potential solutions to housing affordability, the following five key factors are significant:

  • availability of inexpensive and well located land
  • ability to obtain a high dwelling yield per allotment (e.g. medium/high density residential allotments)
  • ability to limit dwelling sizes (e.g. promotion of one bedroom dwellings / apartments)
  • ability to control the resale value of dwellings originally constructed for the affordable housing market
  • ability to retain any public subsidies and/or assets used for the affordable housing program for further public housing.

The report prepared by URPS in association with Norman Waterhouse Lawyers and Southern Research Centre of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Planning Mechanisms to Support the Supply of Affordable Housing Development by the Private Sector, addresses a range of barriers to housing affordability while also promoting a number of robust solutions.

The Minister for Urban Development & Planning released the Ministerial Mount Barker Urban Growth Development Plan Amendment (DPA) in June 2010 for public consultation. This DPA proposes to rezone approximately 1300 hectares of rural land on the edges of Mt Barker and Nairne for residential and light industrial use.

With the aim of ensuring that its community was well informed and empowered to comment on the Ministerial DPA, the District Council of Mt Barker engaged URPS to run a series of information sessions for the local community. These six sessions were extremely well attended, with more than 300 people able to hear about and ask questions regarding the Ministerial DPA process and how to go about getting involved in this part of the planning system.

In a letter to the editor of the Mt Barker Courier, Jean Lovell of Nairne said that "Mt Barker Council is to be congratulated for its commitment to proper community consultation" and that URPS was "highly professional and responded in detail to questions in an articulate, honest and informed manner".

This is evidence of the success of these types of community information sessions and the goodwill and engagement that Mt Barker Council has fostered with its community through the process. We also believe that this type of process leads to informed and valuable input from the community to key planning initiatives such as this Ministerial DPA."